Bridging+Home+and+School+Literacies

One of the trickier questions asked in terms of adolescent literacy, and yet some of the proposed solutions are perhaps the most simple. If this gap is to be bridged properly, changes need to happen on both sides in order to allow for students and guardians alike to have ease of time in finding a solution.

To start, we must look at what is done at home to increase literacy among children. Studies have come out over the years expounding on ideas such as speaking more at home to your children, especially in the earliest years of infancy. Though a child may not actually begin to speak properly until about a year of age, they are still going to be listening and watching how others speak not just to them, but to others. This extended observation period is the first way in which language is imparted on children, and there is growing evidence to support that a child who hears more words spoken to them as a baby and a young child will have hundreds to thousands more words in their vocabulary by the time they get into kindergarten than a child who did not hear much in the way of communication when they were young.

Along with this, parents, guardians and all manner of relatives can impart wisdom from their experiences in learning language and literacy. The modern techniques that we use might not always be effective, and having increased knowledge at home of how to go about learning to recognize letters and letter sounds can start a student on a stronger path towards gaining full and comprehensive literacy. Even having more books to read at home can be an improvement that will help a student with their literacy. In having a wider variety of books to choose from covering a broad spectrum of topics, we can give students more examples of language, how it’s used, and how to use it themselves.

Adding on to increased support at home, schools and government programs can also make changes to how they go about teaching literacy to their students. With grammar becoming increasingly important to teach at a younger age, one can take the many grammatical concepts and narrow them down into teachable and testable lessons that not only teach the grammatical concept, but allow students to practice them as much as possible. Though all grammatical concepts are ultimately important, being able to pick out the ones that are used or even misused the most allows educators to look at what the biggest issues and focus more on them rather than trying to teach students every minuscule concept and construct that exists in our modern grammatical system. This reduces frustrations on the part of students and teachers alike and gives both sides a chance to sit back and look at grammar as well as other aspects of literacy, like citations and building on an extended repertoire of knowledge about literature.

Other tools that can be used to bridge the gap include the public library systems available in the community itself. This is a government run system that can provide not only books, but instructional classes of all kinds that can build on skills already being addressed in school or at home and address new skills that a student might not have gotten to just yet. Such services as provided by the library are usually free as well, and allow struggling students to find a place where they can study and learn under the guidance of both family and school alike.

As you may have guessed, these changes focus on broadening the wealth of knowledge available to students. One cannot hope to make it easier to improve literacy rates across the county and lessen the gap between home and school literacies unless both sides are willing to compromise and change their ways for the benefit of students who are struggling in class. If these kinds of changes are made and both sides are willing to work independently and with each other, then the students will truly gain in literacy.

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[|Trying to Close a Knowledge Gap, Word by Word]